A woman and a bird. Quite a difference, isn’t there?
Photograph: Andrew Parsons/P/A

Abird is a small, fragile thing. It chirrups, flutters and nests. It definitely does not chair board meetings, run multinational corporations or govern nations. So it’s little surprise that a new survey shows “bird” topping the list of “pet names” that British women would like banned from everyday use.

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The research, commissioned by Kellogg’s Special K, surveyed 2,000 women around the country. Fifty-four per cent said “bird” was a word they’d like to consign for ever to Room 101; 45% would bin “doll”; 44% would choose “chick”, while 38% loathe “babe”. They’re all diminutives, you’ll notice. Infantile, in the case of “chick” and “babe”. In all four cases, incapable of speech or even complex thought. Cute, but ultimately unable to change a light bulb unaided.

But – oh, come on now, love – what does it really matter? They’re just words, after all – harmless terms of affection, in fact. The chosen names aren’t even insults or sexist slurs. Who doesn’t love a fluffy chick? Where’s the harm in being compared to one? So stop flapping about it. Don’t brood over it. All this nagging is just henpecking.

A single word, you see, can hatch and breed until you have a whole flock of related words, each different but all related. All pecking slowly away at women’s self confidence, shaping the way women are seen in the workplace and having consequences every bit as real as the damage done by sticks and stones.

Another report came out this week, this time from the global management consultancy firm McKinsey and Co and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In organisation. It analysed data from 132 American companies, representing 4.2 million employees. And for every 100 women promoted to managerial positions, it found, 130 men made the same leap up the ladder. Why? In part, because “birds” aren’t being given the opportunity to show their ability. The report highlighted the fact that women are less likely to be given challenging assignments or to receive the critical feedback we all need in order to get any better at the jobs we do.

While 46% of the men surveyed said they had received difficult feedback, only 36% of women had. The most common reason managers gave for holding back this criticism from women was the fear of being hurtful. And who wants to hurt a little fluffy “chick”? That would just be mean.

A couple of years ago, in the course of writing a book called 100 Leading Ladies, I spoke to 100 of Britain’s most influential women, across all fields and from different walks of life. In an interview with the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, she told me: “I think we have a little difficulty with female public intellectuals in this country because we still attribute gravitas to masculinity.”

Stories such as this piled up. Betty Jackson CBE, one of the UK’s most successful fashion designers, described how: “When we first applied for a loan from the bank, the bank manager addressed all his questions to [her husband] David, even though he’s French and could barely speak a word of English at the time. I had to translate between them.”

Things have moved on since the 1970s and many of these terms sound peculiarly old-fashioned. But words can still hold women back. As the brilliant Baroness Lola Young, currently an independent crossbench peer, told me: “Ambition is almost a dirty word sometimes, especially when applied to women. It’s meant as a covert insult: ‘She’s a really ambitious woman.’”

Perhaps surprisingly, McKinsey’s research showed that more women than men ask for a raise at work (29%, compared with 27% of men). In response, 30% of women were told that they were being “bossy”, “aggressive”, or “intimidating”, compared with just 23% of men.

No surprise, then, that the fifth most hated term singled out by British women is “queen bee”. Because, in a world where the fond nicknames for women are fluffy and cute, being a boss becomes a mild insult. Words matter. You can kill two birds with one stone. But you dent the ambitions of 3.52 billion of them around the world by showering them with a whole lexicon of little pebbles.